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Four Stone Hearth is here again hosted by one of the best anthropology blogs in the cyberworld, Testimony of the Spade. Head there for your fix of contemporary anthropology news and issues. Magnus Reuterdahl of TS introduces Oscar Montelius for this FSH issue. Montelius is an important Swedish and Scandinavian archaeologist best known for developing a relative chronological dating method, known as the Swedish seriation.

Philippines

With elections around the corner, you might want to think, too, of how politicians try to use the herd mentality to get our vote, from rounding up large crowds for their campaign-cum-carnival shows, to creating instant public opinion surveys showing them leading. We have a choice in the way we choose: do we vote as a herd, or do we vote as thinking individuals?

“These crimes are conscious, odious offenses that are part of systematic practice and policy that result in massive environmental destruction, attack on human rights and dignities of a community or group of persons, and pose a threat to the current and future and generations.”

Five months after the massacre, no one has been punished for the crime; no one has been punished for helping build the Ampatuans’ armory of government-issued weapons and ammunition; the Commission on Audit has yet to release to the public a report on the special audit it did on Maguindanao’s public funds, including the alleged misuse of its P84.4 million monthly internal revenue allotment; and the Office of the Ombudsman has yet to report its lifestyle investigation findings to the public.

There could even come a time when the Ibaloi may be hard to find anywhere near their sacred mountain, with the museum in Kabayan town and the centuries-old mummies at the Opdas Mass Burial Cave the only evidence that they were there at all.

In the contemporary world that Manobos share with Visayans, the incorporation of the Visayan spirit in the Manobo ritual is a means for writing the modern or new social order. Like the mountain spirit, the Visayan comes from the distant sphere in the Manobo cosmos, but the Visayan spirit is made intimate and
familiar by hailing it as an amigo (friend).

The Magindanawn people have lived especially in the region of Central Mindanao for countless centuries. Their attachment to, and love for, the land – their ancestral domain – embeds deeply into the Magindanawn psyche and worldview. Despite colonial incursions and imperialist advances against them and their land, by Europeans (especially the Spanish) and the Americans, their manoeuvres ‘within’ American and Manila-imposed political structures by accommodation-politics, and ‘without’ through rebel social movements, have always been done with the goal in mind to keep the Magindanao homeland for the benefit of the Magindanawn people alone.

Anthropology Across the Web

Transparency is paramount. Whatever is posted under your name contributes to your digital footprint, and as the real world and virtual worlds increasingly overlap it’s no longer possible to easily separate one from the other. The messages need to be consistent, and there are ramifications if they aren’t.

In any case, what impressed me was that the cell phone is now used to communicate with the another world and the prevailing information technology is now a part of the magic world. Who knows, maybe in the next generation, there will be robots who can contact celestial beings.

A project that promises to revolutionize the way traditional knowledge is gathered and used across Nunavut’s vast expanse has run into a problem all too familiar to software entrepreneurs everywhere — it’s running out of cash.

“Initially scientists saw this art as the way that the people of the Palaeolithic spent their free time, sculpting figurines or decorating their tools,” Palacio points out. His investigation, published in the last edition of Oxford Journal of Archaeology, reveals the reasons for the move from this recreational-decorative interpretation of Palaeolithic art to different one of a religious and symbolic nature.